FSFE Newsletter – February 2014

A big step forward for Free Software in Italy

More public administrations using Free Software means more money for the
development of Free Software and less problems for citizen using Free Software
communicating with their authorities. In January the Italian
government has made Free Software the default choice for public
administrations. The Italian Digital Agency issued new rules saying that
all government organisations in the country must consider using Free Software
before buying licenses for proprietary programs. The rule, which has been
discussed for over a year, has now been reaffirmed. Carlo Piana, who
participated on FSFE's behalf in the working group, wrote:
"Now public administrations have no excuse not to comply with the guidelines.
There are no more excuses, there is no room for ambiguous interpretations."

Compulsory routers: Private network should be private!

You should be able to use a router of your own choice in your home, so you
can have more control over this gateway from your private network to the
internet. But in Germany ISPs started to force customers to use specific
routers, and did not offer them the internet access credentials to use routers
of their own choice. Together with dedicated volunteers from OpenWRT, IPFire and others, FSFE worked on this issue in
2013, sending a letter to the authorities, and answering 18 detailed
questions. Our argument were then covered by German newspapers, magazines
and and television news sites.

What did we achieve? The new coalition agreement of the German governments
says that they are against compulsory routers, and that the ISPs have to send
the usernames and passwords without request from the customers. Those are the
good news from the new coalition agreement. Our intern Max Mehl summarised our
work on compulsory routers in his blog entry "Why
free choice of routers is a must".

Matthew Garrett criticised
Canonical's contributor agreement. Other copyright assignment tools,
such as FSFE's
Fiduciary License Agreement and the GNU Project's copyright assignment,
enable developers to prevent their code from being used in non-free software.
In contrast, Canonical's agreement explicitly states that the company may
distribute people's contributions under non-free licenses. If you value
software freedom, FSFE recommends you not to sign agreements
which make it possible to distribute your code under non-free licenses.

Get active: You love Free Software? Show it!

Free Software eases our daily life and ensures we can work and create in
freedom. In many cases, we do not pay for these tools and yet we write bug
reports to make the developer improving his software even more. On 14 February
we ask you to show your love to the people working on the Free Software you
use. For example, you could prepare a "love letter" telling the developers of a
certain program why you love their work, include banners or buttons on your
website, (micro)blog about your favourite piece of software, or help
us collecting quotes by well-known people and yourself. On "I love Free Software day", it is time to give
back.

In Manchester, our local group is even celebrating Free Software with a
week-long event. The "I
love Free Software Festival" takes place from 3 to 8 February 2014 and
focusses especially on Bitcoin, Wordpress, encryption, and Free Your Android. It is a great
opportunity to meet other likeminded people in MadLab's great atmosphere.

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The Free Software Foundation Europe is a non-profit non-governmental
organisation. Our work is made
possible by a community of
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Fellows and
donors. Your donations are critical to our
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Software wherever necessary, and to be an independent voice.